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Red Hat betas web-developer tool collection

Red Hat has released a beta of its new Software Collections 1.0 add-on package for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, which is designed to help web application developers by packaging together dynamic languages and databases. The 1.0 version of the collection contains Ruby 1.9.3 with Rails 3.2.8, Python versions 2.7 and 3.3, PHP 5.4, Perl 5.16.3, and a technology preview of node.js 0.10, which can be coupled with stable versions of MariaDB 5.5, MySQL 5.5 or PostgreSQL 9.2, all of which are also included. These versions are a lot newer than the versions that come with RHEL 6 – most of the programs in RHEL 6 are around the same versions as they were when RHEL 6 was released in November 2010.

Red Hat promises more regular updates to the collection than are currently delivered to the underlying operating system. This should allow developers to use their proven enterprise Linux platform without sticking to older versions of tools or compiling their own versions of tools for production deployments.

The beta of the software collection requires RHEL 6.3 or 6.4 and is only available only to Red Hat customers with RHEL subscriptions. The software in the collection is installed in parallel with the version that is included with RHEL and is only used by programs that are explicitly configured to use them. The approach is based on the Fedora Software Collections. A video where a Fedora/Red Hat developer explains the concepts behind collections, recorded at FOSDEM, is available.

More details about the Software Collections 1.0 beta are available in the release notes. It will join Red Hat's developer tools collection released in January. The follow up to that, Red Hat Developer Toolset 2.0 has recently entered beta and now includes Eclipse 4.3.0, Dyninst 8.0, Strace 4.7, MEMSTOMP and updated GNU Compilers including GCC 4.8.